


don't look back at this crumbling fool

by averita



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-03
Updated: 2016-01-03
Packaged: 2018-05-11 10:17:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5623642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/averita/pseuds/averita
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leia Organa: half truths, broken promises, and things left unsaid. (TFA spoilers.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	don't look back at this crumbling fool

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Darla/DKNC, queen of canon and all things Han/Leia, for taking a look and reassuring me that this makes at least some semblance of sense. Title is from Adele's "Take It All".

She feels suspended, balancing on some thin rope high above nothingness, above the fires of hell, and she is so, so careful not to shake. Her hands, her voice - “ _Ben_ ” - it comes out thin and desperate, but steady. His eyes flash and he towers over her but she stands straight. 

“I’m not Ben anymore,” he says. “Don’t call me that.”

“You are my _son_ ,” she tells him fiercely, clenching her hands at her side to keep from reaching out. “You are my son, you will always _be_ my son. Come home. Please. It’s not too late.” 

He hesitates and her heart leaps, beating so fast that she feels weak. She feels Han in some distant part of her mind, feels Luke even further away, but no matter - they may have failed but she can’t. She won’t. 

“You don’t know,” he finally says. “You don’t know what I’ve done.”

She blinks away the tears in her eyes, longs to wipe away those that she sees in his. “I don’t care,” she says. “I forgive you. Do you hear me, Ben? I’ll forgive you anything, just come _home_.” Her voice finally cracks, and for a moment, she thinks that he might have, too.

She’ll never know how close she came, what might have been different if she had kept her hands by her side instead of reaching for him, which one word may have made the difference between him coming home as Ben Solo instead of walking away as Kylo Ren. In some other life, maybe she got it right.

In this one, he walks away. When she crumbles the pieces of her drift like ashes across the galaxy, too soft and scattered to ever be put back together.

***

Rey comes to her the night before she leaves to find Luke.

“It should be you,” she insists, bright and earnest and younger than Leia can ever remember being. “He doesn’t even know me.”

Leia smiles sadly. “Oh, my dear,” she says, taking her hand, and hopes that the girl understands what she can’t say.

***

“Mother, when will Daddy and Chewie be home?”

Leia lifts Ben with less grace than she used to, balancing him on her hip and huffing slightly. “Soon, my darling,” she promises. “Maybe even tonight.” 

They were never going to be a family with feet firmly on the ground, but they make it work. She is a mother, a diplomat, a Princess, a wife, a military leader, an Organa and a Solo and sometimes, reluctantly, even a Skywalker. She travels and works; she missed Ben’s first steps but was there for his first words. Han has taken to domesticity with surprising aplomb but gets as antsy as she does confined to one place for too long, and so now and then he dusts off the _Falcon_ and wanders.

“Do you miss your daddy?”

The question is unexpected and freezes in her stomach; her answer catches in her throat.

Yes, she thinks, she misses her father, misses him with a fierceness that still hollows her out and makes her ache. She misses her mother, her home, all of the things that were taken from her and blown to pieces while she stood and watched. But these days, more often than not, those memories fill her with warmth, a heaviness in her heart that never feels sweeter than when she holds her son and husband close.

The other memories - the other father - she doesn’t think about. 

“Yes,” she finally says, kissing Ben’s temple and inhaling the heady scent of his skin. “Yes, I do. He was a good man, just like yours.”

Years later, when she and Luke finally sit him down and tell him the truth about their family, she wonders if he had felt it even then - that other space inside her, harsh and cold and unexplored. She wonders if it had already been too late.

***

It is a minor scuffle - routine, even. They lose no soldiers, and their ships take only minor damage. It’s hardly worth celebrating but there is precious little to celebrate these days, and so they do.

C-3P0 hesitates as the ready room clears. “Princ - excuse me, General, are you quite well?”

“Yes, thank you,” Leia says, gripping the edges of the command table tightly. “I’m fine.”

***

Real news is few and far between. Luke has been spotted in this system, then that one; Snoke has an army of thousands, millions, infinite soldiers. Neither of Ben’s names is mentioned in her presence, not unless she demands it. Han isn’t around enough for anyone to walk on eggshells with him.

“I love you,” he tells her on one of their rare nights together, tracing her shoulder with his index finger. He leans forward and kisses the spot, holding his lips there before pressing his forehead to hers. For a moment he looks young again, but then she blinks.

“I know,” she says, trying to smile.

When he leaves the next day, he kisses her temple and murmurs “I’ll see you soon.” She wishes him a safe trip and doesn’t see him until she steps off a ship on Takodona, nearly four years later.

***

“General,” Poe greets her with a wide smile, his helmet under his arm and BB-8 whizzing alongside. “Good to see you.”

And oh, he and Han look nothing alike, but somehow it’s all she can see. It’s like a knife sliding smoothly between her ribs, shocking and cold - the battle-flush of his cheeks, the glint in his eye, the confident swagger - 

It takes her a moment to answer, and he frowns. “Everything okay?”

“Yes,” she manages. “Yes, of course. Well done, Poe.” She squeezes his shoulder, knuckles white and numb.

***

Ben is gone. Han is gone, and Chewie, everyone that has ever mattered - everyone except Luke, and now Luke is leaving too.

“There was nothing anyone could have done,” she says thickly. She slumps down in her seat, leaning heavily over the same table that she and her family have shared meals and laughter and endless arguments over; Luke remains standing, but he seems smaller too, small and gray and old. “It’s not your fault.”

But Luke is her brother, and a Jedi, and has always known when she is lying.

***

C-3P0 says that their son looks like Leia, but she doesn’t see it. She doesn’t see much except a blotchy red face screaming from inside a veritable fortress of blankets. She can’t stop staring at it.

Han, though - for the first time she sees him as he must have been as a child, with bright astonished eyes and a smile wider than she’s ever seen. When he holds their son he looks almost bewildered, like he’s not sure how he got there, or what exactly he’s supposed to do with the bundle in his arms. 

Chewie is hoarse for the first time since Leia has known him, having roared himself raw during her long labor; Luke finally left with a flimsy excuse and a kiss to her hand. Leia herself is dreamy and limp, now, and when Han turns to her, she barely raises her head.

“Look at him,” he whispers, awed. “Look at little Wicket.”

Leia swats at him halfheartedly. “Don’t start.”

Luke had named him, in the end, after one too many arguments had threatened to turn violent. “Ben,” he’d said in that tone of voice that was becoming more familiar, less suggestion than solution. “A great name for a great child.” 

Han and Leia had looked at each other; finally Leia - sore, irritable, and content to have one less thing to worry about - had shrugged, and that had been that. 

(It was only later that she thought perhaps her son deserved a name with less history and fewer expectations. A name, after all, is neither as great nor as terrible as the one who takes it.)

“Little Ben Wicket Solo,” Han murmurs. “The universe had better look out.”

***

She has seen death. She’s sent friends and soldiers to their graves, plotted battles, lived and breathed war since she was born into it. She watched her planet explode before her eyes, felt every single soul like splinters in her skin.

She doesn’t see her son kill Han, so it takes her a moment to realize what has happened - that she is not the one who has died.

***

_I forgive you. Do you hear me, Ben? I’ll forgive you anything._

Some days, she still believes it.


End file.
